"The new Moon in Aquarius on February 15 2018 at 1:05 pm PST, also an eclipse, begins the year of the Earth Dog.

Dog year is a time of fairness and equality. Controversial issues are given their due, revolutions are successful, politics are liberal, and political oppression is opposed. Integrity and honesty are the values that lead to success under Dog’s watchful and just influence.

Earth Dog possesses some of the finest qualities of any of the 60 animal signs of the Chinese zodiac." ~Susan Levitt

Additional product information

Exchanges Within concentrates on one main question: How do we find within ourselves what we have lost - our reality, wholeness, and significance - as the human kind of being in the universe?

Through the intensity of his own search, John Pentland radiated the help necessary for group members again and again to discover and try to express where they actually are in the process of understanding and in the movement toward "being." The "exchanges" in Exchanges Within provide a glimpse into the dynamics of a living teaching and reflect genuine efforts toward the discovery and practice of meaningful living in the face of forces that drain human life of the sacred.

Reviews

"Most traditional ways of self-knowledge, whether psychological, philosophical or spiritual, emphasize the necessity of direct work with a teacher. This work entails an exchange of energies but also of ideas and observations. The energies are recorded only in the being of the student, but the observations, expressed through words, may be recorded on paper. Because esoteric traditions reserve a portion of their teachings only for initiates, any publication of hitherto sequestered records of such exchanges is a notable event.

This extraordinary book presents selections from several decades' worth of discussions conducted at group meetings between students and John Pentland, a leader of the Gurdjieff Work from the late 1940s until his death in 1984. The influential psycho-spiritual teachings introduced by G.I. Gurdjieff (1866-1949) emphasize 'self-observation' and 'self-remembering' engaged within a definite cosmology with the aim of self-transformation.

The myriad selections here have been chosen with care to allow the teachings to unfold within the unruly Q&A format, and to impress upon readers the extreme difficulty, yet real possibility, of seeing themselves as they truly are, as a necessary first step in transformation. 'The beginning of evolution of oneself is sincerity,' Pentland says.

Those who read these 'exchanges within' with attention and an open mind are bound to be moved by Pentland's own sincerity, and to benefit from his ability to solicit and to respond to the question behind the question. As a document of the dynamic search for truth among teacher and student, this work fascinates; as an adept extension in written form of that search, it can galvanize." ~Publishers Weekly

Excerpt

"Lord Pentland: The motivation is to be whole. Any other motivation is subjective, egoistic. You follow? Motivation comes from nothing because I have no consciousness. So the motivation is to have at least some consciousness or to keep this experience of nothing-consciousness while functioning. There is no other motivation. I wish to be whole because that is the next level. Working that way I can serve as if on the level that corresponds to my wholeness. The serving is by the functions and nothing-consciousness is the consciousness. The whole work is there. A good starting point. You understand what I said?"